The mainstream media relishes reporting on a proposed bill being debated in Israel that would identify the Jewish state as the nation-state of the Jewish people. News outlets are falling over themselves to quote the bill’s critics and Israel’s critics, regurgitating the tired accusations about Israel’s broken or failing or stained democracy and how anti-Arab and racist Israel must be.

But, they are utterly silent about a new poll released by Israel’s Channel 10 News and conducted by the Statnet Research Institute, headed by Israeli Arab statistician Yousef Makladeh. Israel Today reports:

Makladeh asked fellow Arabs plainly and clearly: “Under which authority do you prefer to live, Israel or the Palestinian Authority?”

A full 77 percent of respondents chose Israel.

The vast majority – over three quarters – of Israeli Arabs prefer to live under the “racist” “apartheid regime” of Israel rather than under the Palestinian Authority.

According to The Jerusalem Post:

Prof. Sammy Smooha, a sociologist from the University of Haifa, told the Post that the survey’s findings appear reasonable.

Smooha points out that his own annual opinion survey, the Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel (based on a random representative sample of 700 face-to-face interviews of those 18 and up, taken in fall 2013), shows that 63.5% of Arabs said Israel is a good place to live.

It also found that only 20.9% of the Arabs are willing to move to a Palestinian state.

These facts seem to undermine the popular media narrative. Is that the reason we’re forced to ask… Where’s the coverage?

World Vision, a $2 billion Christian charity that promotes child welfare in poor countries throughout the world, has recently issued a putatively “balanced” press release about the escalating violence in Jerusalem. The undated release (which does not appear to have any links to it on World Vision’s media page) is not as hostile toward Israel as WV materials have been in the past, but it is problematic nonetheless. It reads in part as follows:

Less than a week ago, a village mosque north of Ramallah was burned down and believed to have been a settler attack on Palestinian Muslims. On Tuesday, five Israelis were killed, and several others wounded, by two Palestinians armed with a pistol, axes and knives at a synagogue in West Jerusalem during a time of prayer. World Vision condemns such acts of terror and religious violence, and shares the grief of those who mourn the passing of all who have died in the violence of recent weeks.

To people unfamiliar with the events of the past week, this passage above appears to be a responsible, even-handed response to violence in Jerusalem, but in reality, it serves to obscure what responsible commentators would confront head-on: The role the allegedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority has played in encouraging violence against Israel and Jews prior to the synagogue attack.
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“Tiny” Tunisia returned to the pages of The Washington Post, this time joined by the “tiny” United Arab Emirates. As for Israel, much smaller than either Tunisia or the U.A.E., its size apparently still lacks newsworthiness.

As CAMERA pointed out two years ago this month, The Post found it important to tell readers that at least eight countries geographically larger than Israel, including Tunisia, were “tiny,” without reminding them of the Jewish state’s comparative—and stragetically vulnerable—smallness of. Make that nine.

In a front-page article headlined “A Quiet, Potent Ally to U.S.; American generals call the UAE ‘Little Sparta’ for its ability and willingness to fight” (November 9), Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes “as a tiny nation on the Arabian Peninsula comprising seven sometimes-fractious emirates led by different royal families, the UAE could have opted to go the way of other small [emphases added] countries in its neighborhood by building a modest military focused on domestic security and instead turning to the regional powerhouse—Saudi Arabia—for protection from Iran and other external threats.”

Instead, its leaders have bought “the most advanced weapons the Emirates can obtain” and “chosen to use what it has acquired.”

The UAE’s land mass is 32,000 square miles, approximately four times bigger than Israel’s. Its population, estimated at close to five million (less than half are citizens) is smaller than Israel’s eight million plus.

As for Tunisia, in The Washington Post, it’s still tiny. In an Op-Ed headlned “Tunisia, a democratic anomaly” (October 27), the newspaper’s deputy editorial page editor, Jackson Diehl, wrote that “nowhere did the voting matter more, however, than in tiny [emphasis added] Tunisia—the North African state where the Arab revolutions began nearly four years ago, and the only place where civil war or a renewed dictatorship has not been the result.”

Two days later in The Post, Tunisia grew from tiny to “small.” Correspondent Kevin Sullivan’s news feature, “How Tunisia’s Arab Spring has fueled the Islamic State; New religious freedoms, then a crackdown, have stirred radicalism” (October 29) informed readers that “Tunisia, a small North African country of 11 million people, has become the largest source of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq…”

As we noted previously, Tunisia’s 63,170 square miles makes it eight times larger than Israel, with at least three million more people. Israel has the land area of New Jersey but is just four miles wide west of Jerusalem in the 1949 armistices lines and barely nine just north of Tel Aviv. Regardless, news media run the newsworthiness of Israel’s geographic “tinyness” and vulnerability in the Middle East through the distorting filter of “big Israel oppressing tiny Palestinians.” So long as they do, readers, viewers and listeners will lack the context necessary to understand the conflict.

Margaret Sullivan, public editor for The New York Times, yesterday tackled the thorny topic of the paper’s coverage of Israel and the Palestinians (“The Conflict and The Coverage“). By way of background, Sullivan mentions CAMERA’s three-story billboard facing the newsroom at the The Times.

The Times is biased, both sides charge. The Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, somehow manages to be — as the critics would have it — both wildly anti-Israel and practically a tool of the Israeli government.

One organization, Camera, even pays for a billboard across the street from the Times building to accuse the paper of regularly attacking Israel. And pro-Palestinian websites like The Electronic Intifada have detailed the ways in which, as they see it, Times coverage fails to do justice to an outcast people. Many readers have castigated me for not jumping into the fray to represent their position. I have searched for a way to write something useful and productive amid all this emotion and criticism, and have — until now — put it off.

Sullivan lays out a number of recommendations, among them:

Diversify. Strengthen the coverage of Palestinians. They are more than just victims, and their beliefs and governance deserve coverage and scrutiny. Realistic examinations of what’s being taught in schools, and the way Hamas operates should be a part of this. What is the ideology of Hamas; what are its core beliefs and its operating principles? What is Palestinian daily life like? I haven’t seen much of this in The Times.

The above recommendation addresses one of CAMERA’s primary concerns about Times coverage: that the paper consistently exonerates Palestinians of any culpability for the conflict and downplays their incitement.

Nevertheless, concerning Sullivan’s focus particularly on Hamas incitement, CAMERA’s Gilead Ini tweets:

Another noteworthy element of Sullivan’s column is a comment she cites by international news editor Joseph Kahn:

I asked Joseph Kahn, the top editor for international news, about this context complaint.

“I hear that criticism a lot,” he said. But, he said, behind it are “people who are very well informed and primed to deconstruct our stories based on their knowledge.” The Times does not hear this complaint, he said, from readers who are merely trying to understand the situation.

In other words, according to Kahn, uninformed readers who are unaware of the facts do not object to Times coverage. This he finds reassuring?
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This is getting weird. Really weird.

It’s one thing to take copyrighted material – in this case a detective series produced by the British Broadcasting Company – and post it on Youtube.

It’s another thing altogether to vandalize that video by pasting anti-Israel propaganda into the video so that you can foist your ideas on unsuspecting viewers.

But that is what one Youtube user, who goes by the moniker “Justice4All,” has done. He has posted a number of episodes of the British television show “Midsomer Murders” on Youtube and posted propaganda for the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Here’s proof:

How ironic. Not only is “Justice4all” a copyright thief, he (or she) is a vandal (and an anti-Israel kook to boot).

For those who are interested, Midsomer Murders show is produced, by the way, by ITV.

The Times of Israel and a few other publications report that the Jordanian Parliament observed a moment of silence for the perpetrators of the Jerusalem synagogue massacre. It will be interesting to see if this is confirmed in other news media. It will also be interesting to see if this event garners any mention in the mainstream media including The New York Times.

Jordan was the second Arab state to make peace with Israel and it is the state with which the Israeli leadership has the closest relationship. It also boasts a population that is virulently anti-Semitic. A recent ADL survey of global anti-Semitism ranked Jordan eighth in the world in the proportion of its population that holds anti-Semitic views, with 81 percent of the population falling into that category.

The visceral hostility of Jordan’s population toward Israel and toward Jews in general is an issue that the media is loath to cover and that officials avoid. But avoiding problems doesn’t make them go away.

A tweet posted by Reuters correspondent Noah Browning in the aftermath of the synagogue bloodbath revealed an appalling callousness to the loss of Jewish lives, as well as a shocking obtuseness in his understanding of events.

This was posted just hours after the savage butchery that left four Jewish worshipers and a young police officer dead and others blind, comatose or severely injured.

Perhaps Browning believed he was revealing an unconventional but clever insight by comparing a damaged Quran, whose burning he unquestioningly attributed to Jews, with a prayer book soaked in blood shed by Palestinian terrorists. But what his outrageous moral equation actually revealed was his own cold-hearted disdain both for Jewish lives and for journalistic integrity.

In fact, the circumstances of the fire at the mosque where the Quran was found were uncertain and debated. While Palestinians blamed the fire on a “Price Tag” arson attack by Jewish extremists, an investigative reporter raised questions about the cause of the fire when he discovered a burnt fuse box and nearby space heater at the site — commonly evidence of an electrical fire.

Perhaps Reuters should reconsider entrusting its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a reporter with such lack of judgement and understanding.

Joshua Mitnick and Nicholas Casey, correspondents for the Wall Street Journal, have long evidenced a bias favoring the Palestinians in their reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in recent months this bias has spun out of control. In a deluge of articles on the upsurge in violence around Jerusalem starting in October, Mitnick and Casey have struck a monotonic chord that always points to Israeli actions and policies as the problem.

Even after the most recent case in which two Palestinians butchered four rabbis praying in a synagogue readers are not spared the usual spin. On November 20, page A10 of the Journal published two articles on the violence encompassing nearly the entire page. The top-of-the-page headline states, “Israel Destroys Home of Car-Attack Suspect.”

The entire thrust of the article is to condemn Israel for “reviving an internationally condemned demolition policy.” In mantra fashion, each paragraph begins with a harsh Israeli action or a criticism of Israeli action.

Paragraph two starts with “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a harsh response…”

Paragraph three starts with a description of the action taken by Israeli soldiers against the family of one of the terrorists.

Paragraph four starts with “The demolition marked the return of one of israel’s m ost controversial policies…”

Paragraph five starts with “The U.S. views home destruction as counterproductive…”

Paragraph six starts with “Palestinians and rights groups say home demolitions aren’t a deterrent and only encourage families to seek revenge, fueling a vicious cycle.”

Paragraph seven starts with a quote from a pro-Palestinian leftist group B’Tselem, “You cannot punish people for other people’s actions.”

Where is the discussion of the Palestinian actions; relentless official incitement to violence based on instilling in its youth a vengeance-driven sense of victimization; Muslim religious doctrine that fuels intolerance of Jews. The failure to attribute Palestinian responsibility to the current violence indicates a patronizing, soft-bigotry on the part of Mitnick and Casey toward the Palestinians.

The second article “Jerusalem’s Jews and Arabs are Fearful after Massacre” provides more of the same one-sided coverage. It opens with the claim that “A heightened sense of fear and division gripped both Jews and Arabs of this city…” Except that in reality, there is not parity here. There have been two innocent Arab victims versus sixteen Israeli ones (fourteen Jews and two Druze) in Jerusalem and the West Bank since June when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered. The deadly violence and the murderous provocation is overwhelmingly on the Arab side and has been consistently for many years.

Mitnick and Casey then engage in revisionist history as they contend that the “current crisis has been in the making since Israel captured the city’s eastern districts from Jordan in the 1967 war…” They have chosen a convenient starting point, as the chronology of Arab violence against Jews in Jerusalem in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s apparently doesn’t count. Why not point to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from eastern Jerusalem in 1949 as the starting point?

Mitnick and Casey allege that it was the Israeli leader’s neglect of Palestinian neighborhoods that is to blame. The incitement to hating Jews and the persistent urging by Palestinian leaders to engage in violence doesn’t make it into their account. Nor does praise for the terrorists as “martyrs” from the most influential institutions in Palestinian society matter. In fact, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a point of praising the attempted assassin of Jewish activist Yehuda Glick as a “martyr.” Such topics reside in a black hole that neither Mitnick nor Casey has the inclination to grapple with. It might require them to push beyond the boundaries of their comfort zone in blaming Israeli authorities.

It would be bad enough if these unbalanced articles were presented in an editorial or opinion piece. But what makes Mitnick’s and Casey’s articles particularly detestable is that their one-sided account is offered under the guise of reporting the news.

The Wall Street Journal can do better.

CBS This Morning flubbed an important detail about yesterday’s attack at a synagogue attack that left five people dead. In the introduction to a correspondent’s report about the attack, CBS journalist Norah O’Donnell reported that “It happened at a contested religious site in Jerusalem.”

The Kehilat Yaakov Synagogue where the attack took place is no such thing. The Har Nof neighborhood where the synagogue is located is in the western part of Jerusalem. It is not a “contested religious site.”

Update: CBS News has removed the video in question.

Peruvian authorities will charge a Lebanese man, Mohammed Amadar, arrested last month in Lima after he confessed to being a member of Hezbollah and had been found with traces of TNT on his hands and in his apartment.

The Times of Israel wrote:

The suspect was reportedly gathering intelligence on Jewish institutions and places frequented by Israeli hikers. Authorities said that they were questioning Amadar to learn more about his intended targets.

According to a report in Haaretz, citing the local La Republica newspaper, Amadar arrived in Peru in November 2013 and married a woman with both Peruvian and American citizenship just two weeks later. The couple left for Brazil, and then returned to Peru earlier this year.

Peruvian authorities were tipped off to Amadar’s alleged activities by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and he was questioned after returning to Peru.

Authorities kept him under constant surveillance, discovering that neither he nor his wife worked, but received Western Union money transfers, a method often used by Hezbollah.

And Reuters reported:

The United States has designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization since 1997, and U.S. officials have sought to limit the group’s operations in South America.

They have expressed concern in particular about Iran supporting Hezbollah activities around the triple border area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

Yet, despite the Reuters story and the coverage in the local and Israeli press, no major media outlets reported this story.

As the negotiations continue between Iran and the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia – plus Germany) on the extent to which Iran will be allowed to continue its nuclear program, Iranian-backed terrorists are operating in America’s back yard. This doesn’t warrant reporting in mainstream media outlets? Of course it does. So… Where’s the coverage?